Monday, September 17, 2012

We watch quite a bit of television at our house. To be honest, I’m perfectly okay with this. We watch less now that Baby A is around, but still quite a bit.

The other thing you need to know about us is that we are complete and total nerds. Well...I’m a nerd. And I’ve let my nerdiness spread to Skyler. Like a disease. It’s how I made sure to ruin him for other women. I used to be embarrassed by my nerdiness, but I realize now that it is part of what makes me awesome.

So why am I telling you all of this anyway? Well, because the Boy and I are going on a little journey, and we would like to take you along. This journey is called: The Final Frontier. That’s right...we’re watching our way through Star Trek. All of it. Unfortunately, I didn’t start writing this blog until after we had started, but don’t worry...we still have 400+ hours to go.

The question you may be asking yourself is; why would we do this to ourselves? A little background for you.

When I was little, I was a Trekkie. Not a Trekker, that term hadn’t been invented yet. At least I don’t think it had been. I watched Star Trek: Next Generation like it was my job. I dressed up to go to see Star Trek: Nemesis at the Mall of America with my friends. Followed up by laser tag. I got really into Deep Space 9 and Voyageur for awhile too. One year, I got a Spock ornament for Christmas. Then, well, I’m not sure what happened. I lost interest. My friend who was into Star Trek with me moved to Colorado. I became aware of the immense social ostracism caused by my obsession with a television show about a star ship captained by an English dude with a thing for tea and piloted by an eleven year old. In any case, besides a few episodes caught on SciFi from time to time, I hadn’t watched anything Star Trek related in almost a decade.

Me, circa 1993. Sigh.

Enter the Boy. From quite literally the beginning of our relationship, I have been introducing him to all things nerdy. He was one of those cool kids in school. He had been into...well I’ll be honest I don’t know what the cool things were back then. If I had known, I would have been cool. Eminem and sports maybe? Or Tupac and big parties? I don’t know. In any case, when he met me, let’s just say his mind was opened to new things. Things like Buffy and musicals and Slings and Arrows. He is still not into all of it. He insists he “puts up” with musicals just for me. As if I haven’t heard him humming some Loerner and Lowe under his breath from time to time. I digress. The point is that I had been the initiator of all things nerdy in our lives.

Little did I know, I had unleashed a monster.

Or, since this post is about nerds...a dragon. I unleashed a dragon.

Imagine my surprise when I walked into our room at the HouseofBoys (another story for another day) and found him watching an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise.

Me: “What are you doing?”

He: “I watch this sometimes.”

Me: “It’s Star Trek.”

He: “You’ve ruined me for other women.”

I sat down and watched the episode with him and was reminded of why I loved Star Trek in the first place. So then, I watched it sometimes. Unfortunately, this meant on the rare instances we would try to watch the show together, one of us had invariably seen the episode already, but the other one hadn’t. It also meant I knew exactly what was going to happen at the beginning of the final season but had no idea what was going on in Season 2. We got frustrated and stopped watching.

Finally, about a year later, JJ Abrams introduced his beautiful masterpiece that is the new and improved I’ve-never-found-Vulcans-so-sexy Star Trek. We went to see it and then we went to see it again. And AGAIN. We’re poor. We don’t see movies in the theatre twice. We certainly don’t see them three times. But we couldn’t help it. We were in love (with the movie, and with each other, although in this instance, the movie is what I was talking about).

At that moment we decided we needed to really experience Star Trek. We decided we wanted to be able to go to a convention someday and actually know what people were talking about. We wanted to not feel like posers if we ever decide to visit Riverside, Iowa, which after all is on our way to visit our families...in a round about sort of way.

Netflix to the rescue!!!

As of right now, we have finished Enterprise, The Original Series, and all the movies that go with TOS. We also watched the animated series, although that was in a distracted "we'd rather be doing something else" sort of way. The animated series was awful, but blessedly short. We took a break from Star Trek to discover Doctor Who (holy crap, where has THAT been all my life?) and Sherlock. We are now about half way through the first season of Next Generation. My memory of this show is patchy so far. I either remember every.detail.ever of an episode or I feel like I've never seen an episode. Not a lot of in between.

The next Star Trek post will tell you a little about what we’ve thought so far and what’s next in our voyage with our favorite ship. Well... our second favorite ship. Because obviously, there's another, shiny shiny ship out there in the 'verse that we love just a little bit more. And then there's that darn policebox...Okay, we have a lot of favorite ships.